Hold ’Em Hostage Read online

  Maybe who Frank was now wasn’t who he used to be. And if that was true, how did I feel about that?

  My head was beginning to hurt with my self psychoanalysis. “What’s your problem?” I snapped at Ben. Maybe I could analyze him instead. “Pouting because you’re not going to win the Main Event this year?”

  He slid me a slitty-eyed look. “No.”

  A pair of women walking past us paused in midstep to stare at Ben. One grabbed the other’s arm and stage-whispered, “Do you really think it’s Colin Farrell? I think he plays poker. No, he looks more like Ben Affleck. He played one time in a cash game with my best friend’s sister’s brother’s niece’s uncle’s mother.”

  It was Ben’s usual invitation to flirt with a wink and a grin. He didn’t even look their way.

  “How’d you do that anyway?” I continued to taunt him, hoping for anything, even an explosion. “It’s hard to bust out of a tournament that early, especially one with ten thousand people playing.”

  With a grunt, Ben strode on ahead. His phone sang a strain from “Lord of the Thighs” by Aerosmith. I never had the stomach to ask him where he found that as a ring tone but now it reminded me Ben was still Ben. He hadn’t yet changed his ring tone to the theme song of The Wonder Years, so maybe I didn’t have to worry. He answered, striding so fast he was almost running to keep me from hearing him. Stilettos or no, I still caught up with him. Ha! He ducked into a men’s room. Damn, I was tempted. Sorely tempted…

  “Excuse me, Bee Cool,” a young female voice asked as a finger tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Yes?” Ingrained politeness answered. I turned around, even as I realized I probably should be jumping away in case it was another Dragsnashark associate in drag. Before me stood two teenage girls, dressed in jeans and logo tees, one of them reminding me so much of Aphrodite that my heart ached.

  “Can we have your autograph?” They shoved WSOP programs forward. They were both stuffed with some extra paper behind the page with my photo and I moved to slide it out of the way. One of the girls stopped me, tapping on my photo. “Sign here.”

  I did, a bit of an awkward signature because of the bulkiness underneath, but oh well. “We are big fans of yours, Bee Cool. It’s awesome the way you dress so model, act so hot, play so cool and beat all those stuck-up ugly old pros who think they’re so smart.

  “We want to be like you one day. Like, wear Marc Jacobs and Derek Lam and Manolos and Choos, come to Vegas and play poker all day.”

  “Is that right? Let me tell you, first you need to have a real job too, you know. And go to college. I couldn’t have money to put on the table if I didn’t work as an ad executive.”

  “That’s not true,” the petite blonde said. “You won half a million dollars last year. The Internet said so.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read, especially on the Internet.” I warned. “Playing poker is entertainment, so when you’re old enough you can set aside what you want to spend on that and only spend that much. No borrowing to win money, understand?”

  Neither girl looked convinced. “Speaking of money,” the brunette put in. “We caught the bus here from Oregon just to see you, our idol, but now we don’t have enough to go home.”

  I sighed. I hated this. I didn’t want to encourage this kind of behavior, but if Affie were somewhere now needing bus money home I hoped some kind soul would give it to her. I reached into my purse, found my wallet and extracted two hundred-dollar bills.

  I dangled the money out to them but held fast as I ordered, “Now, your parents are missing you, I’m sure. Go straight to the bus station and—”

  “So you see, my good people,” a voice behind me boomed. “How your children are being corrupted by the evil poker players of the world. This gambling game, this Texas Hold ’Em, it is poison, and its players are akin to the devil. Plying our youth with money, money, money, addicting them to the game so young. It is to be scorned. It is to be STOPPED!”

  The girls snatched the cash out of my hand and ran. I spun around to see Phineas Paul with a gawking bunch of tourists who were pointing at me and shaking their heads. Then I noticed the cameraman and reporter. I turned and looked at where the girls had disappeared, narrowing my eyes in thought. It couldn’t have been staged, could it? They really had seemed inordinately thrilled with my fashion sense.

  Ben emerged from the restroom just then, took in the scene in a split second, grabbed my arm and hauled me in the opposite direction and around the corner. “Wait. Wait! Miss Cooley. We’d like a comment,” the reporter yelled.

  “Do you think Paul’s been following me around waiting for me to do something to play into his twisted, sick hand?”

  Ben’s mouth twisted into a tight grin, making him look a little more like himself than he had since last night. “Even you have to admit, Bee Bee, it wouldn’t have been a bad bet. Considering all the messes you get yourself into on a regular basis.”

  We could hear feet running behind us. Ben dove into the next open doorway and we found ourselves in the Harley Davidson shop. Not pausing, he wound us through the clothes racks and shoved me headfirst into a dressing room. He followed and slammed the door.

  “How long do you think this is going to take?” I asked after a minute.

  Ben opened his mouth but before he could speak a knock at the door silenced him. “Hey! Hey! We don’t allow that kind of thing in here,” a heavily accented Eastern European female voice warned. I knew from my last visit to Vegas that those with a bossy foreign accent probably were in employ at the hotel or casino.

  “What kind of thing is banned?” Ben asked. “Talking?”

  “Nein,” she barked. “I mean, no. Hokay, if you try on, then you can stay in there. Hokay?”

  “Hokay,” Ben answered. “Why don’t you pass us something to try on, then, sugar?”

  I could feel the poor woman melting on the other side of the louvered door. Ben’s appeal surpassed his looks. It was truly disgusting.

  A half second later a trio of shirts, a black leather skirt with lots of chain and a pair of black leather pants wafted over the top of the dressing-room door. Ben grabbed them, allowing, I noticed, his fingertips to brush Miss Nein’s hand. She sighed. I coughed to hide my gag. Ben looked over the selections. The pants were his, the skirt was mine, two were men’s shirts, the other was a women’s shirt that he passed to me. It was a black Harley-emblazoned T-shirt that looked like it ended at a cap sleeve but really continued with a see-through fabric that was dyed to look like skin tattooed all the way to the wrist. Okay!

  Ben surveyed my shirt, putting his fingers behind the tattoo fabric. “This is cool. You ought to try it on.”

  “Sure,” I muttered. “It’s just my style. High fashion meets low rider.”

  “It’s exactly not your style, which is exactly the point.” Ben nodded. “Look, Bee Bee, between the bad guys after you and that scary preacher, I was just thinking you could use a disguise. If this works, it might be it.”

  “I’ll look like an Annie Duke wannabe,” I argued.

  “As long as you don’t look like Bee Cool.” Ben shrugged.

  Just to shut him up, I turned my back and doffed my button-down, and squeezed myself into the skin-tight shirt. The transparent sleeves went down past my wrists in an impressive faux effect. Ben gasped and spun me around to face him.

  “This is unbelievable, Bee Bee,” he exclaimed. “They look real! Even from this close up.”

  “Hokay, you two,” the store clerk whispered through the louvers, “if you don’t take care of things not so loud, I got to call security.”

  Ben and I looked at each other in question.

  I opened the door and stepped out. A small crowd had gathered outside the dressing room and, since I didn’t notice Reverend Paul and his impromptu congregation, I just assumed the line meant there was a big midnight demand for Harley wear. That is, until one man nudged his buddy, pointed at my chest and said, “Yeah, I’d say those look pretty real even c
lose up too! I win the bet.” He held out his palm to his friend, who fished for his wallet as he peered at my breasts.

  “Listen, dude,” I sneered in an attempt to match my tattooed persona, “he was talking about the tattoos!”

  “Sure, and what were you all doing in there, comparing artwork?” Yuk yuk yuk.

  “He’s my brother,” I answered in full affront mode.

  “You like it a little kinky? We could go for that,” his companion chortled.

  I spun around to see why my loser brother wasn’t helping me, and saw him with a leather hat, the leather pants and the leather skirt. Abandoning my impromptu fan club, I hissed in his ear, “What are you doing?”

  He reached into my purse and pulled out my wallet, handing over my credit card with a skilled aplomb. “We are buying your disguise.”

  “Oh.” I arched an eyebrow. “I see I will be wearing men’s size 32 leather pants also?”

  “Those are my early birthday present,” Ben said, winking at the store clerk whose name tag read “Helga.” She wiggled and giggled.

  Ben grabbed the hat with one hand and gathered my hair in the other, stuffing the tendrils under the hat. I’m sure I looked just terrific. “Don’t I need some black lipstick to go with this?” I asked.

  “Actually, midnight blue is in right now,” Helga told Ben, who reached for a tube off the display at the register.

  I grabbed his forearm in a death grip. “Don’t you dare!”

  “Come on, Bee Bee, gotta be authentic if you are going biker chick.” He clamped a metal chain-link bracelet that looked like an instrument of torture on my wrist. Horrified, I dropped his arm and he snatched up the lipstick and passed it to Helga, his very willing partner in crime. Nearly four hundred dollars later (he, armed now with Helga’s phone number), we walked out of the Harley shop and down the corridor toward the parking garage. He’d made me change into the skirt. I held my ground on the lipstick and refused Helga’s suggestion that I get some knee-high boots.

  “I think it would’ve been cheaper to buy a real tattoo,” I complained.

  “Do you want one?” Ben asked, proud owner of a giraffe tattoo on his abdomen. A giraffe that incidentally tucked its head just inside the waistband of Ben’s swim trunks. Sick. Don’t ask me where his head ended up when Ben had his undies on. I don’t want to know.

  “No!” I said

  “It might be good for your investigation.” Ben pointed out. “After all, we could ask the tattoo artist about your bad guy’s tattoo—what it means, who might have drawn it on him.”

  Evil. My brother was completely evil. Of course I was tempted to investigate. “Why don’t you get another one?” I asked.

  “Bee Bee, I already have three.”

  “Three? Where are the other two?”

  Ben raised his eyebrows. “You wanna see?”

  “No!” I blurted so loud that several groups of people in the parking garage turned around.

  “Okay. Be that way.”

  We walked in silence for a while, me holding out as long as I could to ask the next question. “What are they, then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What kind of tattoos are they—in case I need to identify your body.”

  “That’s uplifting, Bee Bee.”

  “Well, it’s happened before,” I reminded him.

  “Okay, okay. They are a pair of lips with an eye in the middle and a tree frog.”

  I knew I shouldn’t ask the next question. “Where?”

  “Well, the tree frog is climbing up—”

  I was saved by Aerosmith singing from Ben’s phone. “Hello? Hi, Frank. We are going to get Bee Bee a tattoo.”

  I punched his shoulder. Part of me was relieved to see Ben seemed more himself since we’d done the Harley stop—the part of me that wasn’t pissed off about me being transformed into a biker chick. I wondered what my police shadow thought of this.

  “I’ll tell her,” Ben promised as he handed over the phone.

  “Frank wants you to get a butterfly on your—”

  I snatched the phone out of his hands. “Where are you? Any leads on Affie?”

  “Joe and I are chasing down information on the tenants in the building where Carey last saw your stalker. I’ll see you back at the hotel in a couple of hours.”

  “I ran into one of your old friends.”

  I could hear Joe in the background calling Frank’s attention away. “Really? I want to hear all about it when I see you. Have fun getting your tattoo.”

  Typical man, so titillated by the image of me getting a tattoo in the mystery place he wanted it that it never occurred to him that we were going to be doing investigative work. Because if it had, Frank would’ve never let me go.

  I handed the phone back to my brother and offered him my arm. “Lead on to the best tattoo parlor in Vegas!” There was no doubt that Ben would know exactly where that was.

  Eleven

  After spending my whole life imagining a tattoo parlor as a dark, dirty hole-in-the-wall, the Tattoo Palace was a revelation. Cleaner, more welcoming and more well-appointed than most spas I’d frequented, it was also the size of a department store. And, it was packed.

  The clientele might be generally a little rougher than the spa, but not entirely. A fiftyish country-club wife walked by wearing Burberry and carrying Prada, and flashed the Chanel logo newly tattooed on her upper thigh. I almost swallowed my tongue.

  “I want to be classy even with nothing on,” she slurred, winking at Ben.

  “I wonder what she’s going to think about that once she sobers up and gets home to Cleveland?” Ben said in aside to me as he returned her wink.

  I suppose there would be no better place to have a tattoo business than Vegas—where people were more spontaneous due to the gambling windfalls, the flowing liquor and the sexual aura surrounding the city. Face it, whether you like them or not, want one or don’t, tattoos are sexy.

  While we awaited our turn, Ben wandered away and I saw him a few minutes later talking intensely on the phone. When he returned, he was frowning again. While it was gratifying to see that he was working on putting some character lines on that perfect face of his—it worried me.

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “You know, Bee Bee, some things are none of your business,” he snapped.

  Dr. Jekyll was back. But before I could delve deeper into his emotional state, a woman who was tattooed from fingertip to toenail appeared in a flimsy dress. We could see straight through it, although her voluptuous body was so artfully covered with ink that you couldn’t tell where her private parts began and ended in the mass of serpents and flowers and leaves. I think it was a scene from the Garden of Eden. Wow.

  I must have been staring with my mouth wide open. Ben was panting, I think. She let us look, paid no doubt more for her advertising abilities than her secretarial ones. After a few moments, she snapped her fingers in Ben’s face. “Roll your tongue back in.” She jabbed me in the shoulder with her index finger. “Get a move on, Joaquin is ready.”

  She led us down a hallway decorated with photo after photo of tattooed skin. Not just a catalog, this was real photographic art of subjects in poses that juxtaposed and confused, enlightened and engrossed the audience. Woman, man, human or animal, sometimes combinations of all of the above—it was often impossible to tell. I paused at one and studied it. “This is a litter of piglets.”

  I swallowed. Tattooing seriously smarted from what I understood. Poor little porkers. “Who would do that?”

  A young Native American man poked his head out of the next private suite.

  “Someone with vision. Cool, huh?”

  Our escort left us without an introduction, and we were ushered into the suite. Full body, Joaquin was a human art form. He wore his hennaed hair in a modified Mohawk, with a ponytail cascading down his back. His skin told the story of warriors through history—not only various American Indians but Viking, samurai and even an Amazon. I strai
ned to see the images stretched from his shoulder to his back.

  “They made a helluva ear-shattering noise when we took the needle to them, though,” he said, breaking into my fascinated examination.

  “Who?” I asked, imagining the samurai brandishing the sword, mouth gaping in a scream, on his left pectoral.

  “The piglets.”

  “Oh,” I answered, nonplussed.

  “So,” Joaquin asked. “Who’s becoming art today—the tattoo virgin, or you? Nice work on your tricep by the way.”

  Ben smiled, rolling up the sleeve of his golf shirt to expose his new tree frog (that was not where I’d guessed it would be). “Virgin.” He chuckled in my direction. “I guess Bee’s Harley shirt didn’t fake you out, huh?”

  Joaquin rolled his eyes. “It’s like comparing a comic book to a Jackson Pollock.”

  Okay. “Ready for another Pollock?” I looked at Ben but he waved his palms at us.

  “No more for me. Three is my lucky number.”

  No problem, I’d planned for this. If Ben had gone for it, I was going to interrogate Joaquin about Dragsnashark while he drew a picture in permanent ink on my brother. If Ben chickened out on me, then I was going to fake like I was going to get the needle, but slide my questions in before it made a mark.

  “I guess I’m up then.”

  Joaquin’s black eyes lit up with an excitement that was a bit disturbing. “Awesome. That alabaster skin, so smooth and perfect, will be a challenge. Heady.” He started nodding to himself. I think he had a thing for tattoo virgins. I was close to losing my nerve.